User blog:Gregory Exploit/Vandalism: Easy Reversion Practices
Hello! I'm here to talk to you about vandalism. We've had about 20-30 cases of vandalism in the months of July to December 2011. Although the whole vandalism situation here is under control, stronger vandals can still strike unexpectedly. Here are some interesting tricks to crush more advanced variations of vandalism. There are seven major types of vandalism: Regular Vandalism (trick 1), Harassment Vandalism (trick 1), Page Vandalism (trick 2), Media Vandalism (trick 3), Template Vandalism (trick 4), Hidden Switch Vandalism (trick 5), and Edit Summary Vandalism (trick 6). The higher the trick number is, the more advanced the vandalism. Trick 1. Regular Vandalism is just standard vandalism. It's the process of removing valuable content or adding malicious or demoralizing content. Trolling, swearing, inserting random gibberish, and removing content from pages are all forms of standard vandalism. The process of reverting vandalism is completely mechanical. Here's the "lazy way": If the vandal got lazy and just vandalized once, then you can revert it. Go to the vandal's user page and then click "Contributions". There should be a log. Click or open a new tab for "prev" next to each count of vandalism. In the "changes" screen, click on "undo". Finally, click on "publish". That was easy! In cases of multiple counts of or repeated vandalism, here's the "super sleuth way": Next to a page, there should be a button with either "View Source" (in protected pages) or "Edit" (for unprotected ones). Click on the little arrow next to "edit", and it will bring up a drop-down menu with "Rename" and "History". Click on "History" to bring up a complicated complete list. Evaluate all of the usernames and IP addresses brought up, and click on the "prev" hyperlink nearest the IP or user you believe is vandalizing. Check the "changes" dialogue that follows, and if the content on the left transforms into the gibberish on the right, you've caught your vandal. Look at the IP or user in the upper right, and then report that person to an active admin's talk page in another tab. Then press the "prev" hyperlink on the upper left, and it should bring up another dialog, this one exhibiting a benevolent change. Now click on the "edit" hyperlink in the upper right, and a notification as well as the editing dialog box should appear. Just type in "Vandalism" or "Vandalism Restoration" to enunciate your purpose, and then click on the "Publish" button. This will override all vandalism, and - voila! - you've easily "rollbacked" vandalism. Users with the rollback ability can just click on the "rollback button" to revert all edits. Vandalism by multiple users stacked one on top of another or vandalism caused by a user and its IP cannot be reverted this way, though, and manual rollback is necessary. A variation of this occurs with Harassment Vandalism. When a user is harassed or taunted, don't just sit back and do nothing. With the exception of unrelated content, Harassment Vandalism is exactly the same as Regular Vandalism. Either undo the count of vandalism or revert to a lesser file, as shown above. With either Harassment or Regular Vandalism, report the IP address or user to either Natiscool, JSquish, or the Wiki Problems page. Thus, you've caught the vandal in a pincer. Trick 2. There's a similar type of vandalism. Regular Vandalism consists of deforming content already available within pages with gibberish, sexual/racist content, curse words, or a nasty message. Harassment Vandalism is the process of deforming a user page or user talk page as well as leaving nasty blog comments. All can be reverted easily. But Page Vandalism is a lot different. Like Regular Vandalism, Page Vandalism is easy to revert and is quite minor. However, it requires a completely different process and actually requires the assistance of an admin. Page vandalism is the type of vandalism related to the creation of rogue pages with little or no actual wiki-related content. To delete a spam page, edit it, go to source mode, and erase all of the content and hidden codes/triggers there (categories included). Replace the content with the "delete and "speedydelete" templates. Use " " to enter a reason for the speedydelete template. The source should look like this: In more friendly terms, when a spam page is created, click on the "edit" button. Then, when the editing dialogue appears, switch to source mode. In the upper right of the box where you type in things, there are two tabs labeled "Source" and "Visual". "Visual" is the default setting. Click on "Source". Then you will see all content placed by the vandal, including hidden triggers (some clever vandals insert corrupted HTML that might prevent erasing). Highlight and delete all of the content in the Editing and Categories dialogs. Then insert the aforementioned templates. These are the "delete" and "speedydelete" templates, accessible by typing "Template:Delete" or "Template:Speedydelete" in the search bar. As usual, report the vandal to JSquish, Nat, or the Wiki Problems page. Administrators, when you come across a fake page, delete it immediately. I recommend that you check these pages regularly, about once a month (once a week when this wiki gets bigger). Trick 3. Tricks one and two are reserved for simple vandalism, which accounts for 90% of vandalism. However, vandals can get clever; Media Vandalism can cause pandemonium among howling protesters. Media Vandalism is the practice of adding unrelated or offensive pictures to a wiki. For example, uploading a photo of Angry Birds on Pocket God Wiki or a picture of cats on Plants vs. Zombies Wiki is Media Vandalism. To check out the latest pictures, go here: Media Vandalism is hard to spot because it doesn't appear in the Wiki Activity Log. But the New Files Log makes Media Vandalism stand out like a smurf in a crowd of people in plaid shirts. When you spot Media Vandalism, click on the edit button and insert the delete and speedydelete templates like in trick 2. The estranged photo will now be marked for deletion. Adding rogue videos, sound bits, and pop-up triggers are also variations of Media Vandalism. Again, only administrators can delete fake files and pages. Administrators can create bots, like Nat's "Klikbot", to automatically edit or delete pages or files. Trick 4. Now we're entering the zone of the cleverest vandals. Template Vandalism is next to impossible to spot. To identify Template Vandalism, you must access the Recent Changes Log. Here's a quick link: This page allows you to see all edits on Template pages. To revert Template Vandalism, access the template page and then do trick 1. It's simple to revert but insanely difficult to spot. After 30 days, Template Vandalism will become impossible to detect via recent changes. Trick 5. If any vandal performs trick 5, he/she must be a persistent vandal. What happens in Hidden Switch Vandalism is very precise and meticulous. In Hidden Switch Vandalism, the vandal inserts "hidden switches" in the HTML coding, causing overt or covert attacks. Hidden switches are invisible in visual editing. Here's an example of a hidden switch: This causes a spam message to appear whenever an unsuspecting reader clicks on the link. Hidden switches can cause the editing process to go awry. Expert coders know very well how to use HTML, what with codes like , , and . Malicious HTML messes up editing processes, allowing simpler trick 1 vandalism to become impossible to clean up. To remove Hidden Switch Vandalism, move to source mode. Scan the area for triangle parentheses (these things: <>). Remove all content. This will cause hidden switches to deactivate, as well as remove all formatting. If the problem still persists, remove all pictures. After that, publish the edit to dismantle all hidden switches. Now do trick 1 to revert back to the original version. Because the hidden switches are now deactivated, there will be nothing to stop you from removing Hidden Switch Vandalism once and for all. Trick 6: Trick 6 is arguably one of the easier types of vandalism to revert. However, only administrators can dent this kind of vandalism! A certain portable bovine named Ban/Podos was the first who exhibited this cool trick. Some clever vandals abuse the edit summary feature. So they type something offensive as an edit summary, and it's emblazoned "for all eternity". They might put something like "ANGRY BIRDS IS BETTER THAN POCKET GOD" or "GrrrBRAINSarblarbl" as an edit summary. Thus, everyone who reads the edit summary will encounter the nasty message. This type of vandalism can only be removed by administrators, thanks to their ability to delete pages. When a vandal commits this "Summary Defacing", copy the content of the page and create a new page with any title, as long as it doesn't fit in (like "Angry Birds"). Paste the content of the original page into your new page and publish it. It is recommended that you check the content twice to make sure that it is identical to the original. Then delete the original page - the edit summary will also disappear! Now move the weird page over to the original title. Finally, delete the redirect page that results. This causes the vandalized edit summary to be replaced with a clean slate. Thanks for reading this and putting through with this long blog post. I sound like your 10th grade history teacher, do I not? Feel free to share these strategies with other wikis, because these are excellent anti-vandalism measures. -Gregory v1.0 Gregory Exploit 22:14, November 28, 2011 (UTC) v2.0 Gregory Exploit 19:27, February 6, 2012 (UTC) v2.1 Gregory Exploit 02:50, February 13, 2012 (UTC) v2.2 Gregory Exploit 23:28, April 18, 2012 (UTC) Category:Blog posts